The future is yours and it's up for grabs.

As part of the Bristol Literature Festival, science fiction writers, social scientists and roboticists came together in that magical place where their disciplines overlap to create three fictional stories.

What do you imagine when you hear the word robot? Search and rescue bots? Assisted surgery? Military drones? Probably, and you'd be right. But what about robots that eat and excrete, have rat's whiskers to find their way around and fingertips that are sensitive to touch?

One thing's for sure, reality will be much more interesting and messy than the Hollywood robot apocalypse or the AI that frees us from all of life's drudgery.

The future is waiting. Can we predict it? Can we prepare for it? Can we shape it?

These stories could be the very thing you need to begin to answer those three important questions.